Study

by Jón Örn Loðmfjörð (Lommi)

I.

In my study beside to a small table and tattered couch,
a bookshelf jerrybuilt from wooden planks
and big flathead screws that stuck a full four centimeters
out of the wood.

The shelf was crammed with math books, biology books,
textbooks of all types and for a long time,
every volume of The General Practitioner,
that is, until my six-year-old sister decided to start hiding them
under her bed, self-diagnosing when she couldn’t sleep,
and then announcing to mom the next day that she had
a combo of pyloric stenosis, subcutaneous edema, hysteria, and gastritis.

II.

I bored quickly of staring at the shelf and so started
to clamber through the books to get to know them
better.  On one such expedition, I found two things I’d
never seen before: a crystal bowl and a book of poetry.  If I stared
at the crystal bowl, I could see some sort of reflection, but it was too
distorted and blurry to do me any good.  The poetry
had nothing to do with science and didn’t seem like it’d
be useful for diagnosing diseases. 

If my dad’d walked in while I was probing the poetry book,
I’d’ve asked him about the Boer Wars and other minor armed conflicts.
Then he would’ve gotten out a volume of his German encyclopedia,
flipped hastily through, muttering over the German text, sighing
and yawning and then asking if I had some math homework I should be doing —
giving me time to hide the book.

Translated by Larissa Kyzer.